Research notes on every problem, and a library of the papers behind them. Built from the open erdos repository.
Updated
Claim. The answer to Problem 56 is no. Write for the largest size of a set with no pairwise coprime elements and for the set of integers up to divisible by one of the first primes, the example the question offers. Ahlswede and Khachatrian prove (Proposition 1 and Example 1 of the paper; the repository's reading is on the card Ahlswede and Khachatrian 1994) that if satisfies and , then for and every with one has , and that satisfies both inequalities. So for and in that range, which lies above , the multiples of the first primes are not the largest set without pairwise coprime elements. The authors add, as an expectation and not a theorem, that known results on gaps between consecutive primes (Erdős's and Rankin's) should show that the inequalities (H) hold for infinitely many , giving such exceptions for arbitrarily large . The paper's positive results, Theorems 1 and 2, concern Erdős's general function , the largest size of a set of integers up to coprime to the first primes with no two coprime elements: among squarefree numbers the multiples of are extremal for every and , and in general for every large in terms of . The problem's own case , like , the paper calls easy.
What survives. Erdős then asked whether the conjecture holds once is large in terms of ; the authors' 1995 sequel proves that it does, which is the accepted partial claim Ahlswede and Khachatrian 1995, and leaves the answer to the statement above no.
Formalization. The linked Lean file in Boris Alexeev's repository declares
itself a formalization of a solution to the problem whose original human proof
is this paper; its header says that ChatGPT (OpenAI) explained a proof of the
result, not necessarily the original one, that Aristotle (Harmonic)
auto-formalized that text, and that the statement comes from the
formal-conjectures project with a hand correction of a missing condition,
verified under Lean 4.24.0. The file was first committed on 2025-11-25 at the
repository's root and moved under src/ in the reorganizations of 2025-11-26
and 2025-11-27; the link is pinned to the last commit that touched the file at
its present path. This corpus has not built or audited the file, so no
formalized evidence is listed.
Acceptance. The site's curator, T. F. Bloom, marks the problem disproved
and credits this paper for the case , which the page lists as
reviewed. The paper is R. Ahlswede and L. H. Khachatrian, On extremal sets
without coprimes, Acta Arith. 66 (1994), no. 1, 89--99, a refereed journal,
listed as refereed. The page is dated by the publication year alone: the
publisher's record gives 1994 without a month, so the first day of the year
stands in for the issue date.